An article, for example a product, its packaging, and/or an advertisement, may include a number of pieces (categories of elements). Each category may include a number of versions of a particular item (elements). For example, a number of versions of a background may be grouped together in a background category. The article's appeal, e.g., consumer appeal, may depend upon the particular elements of the included categories that are included in the article. For example, a package design that includes one version of text and/or a background may be more appealing than a package design that includes a different version of the text and/or background. For example, a package design that includes a green background may be more appealing than a package design that includes a blue background. As a further example, in case of an advertisement, one particular combination of text messages may be more appealing than another combination of text messages.
Before producing an article, companies, particularly marketing companies or marketing departments of many companies, design test concepts for the article. The test concepts may be designed manually or through computer generation. Element categories and specific elements vary between the various test concepts. For a particular article, a company may present a number of test concepts to a panel of respondents, and the respondents rate each concept. To determine which combination of elements produces the most appealing article, a utility value for each of the possible elements is obtained. The utility values are obtained via an analysis of the returned ratings for the test concepts.
To perform certain types of conjoint analysis, each respondent may be presented with design concepts. Often, articles can be produced from very numerous possible element combinations, sometimes thousands of combinations. Therefore, to present to the respondents each possible combination is highly impractical. Consequently, only a subset of possible element combinations is chosen as design concepts for presentation to the respondents. Although not every element combination is tested, each individual element is tested or imputed through some type of interpolation procedure. A conjoint analysis therefore produces a utility value for each of the individual elements.
However, although individual elements may have high utility values, indicating that each of the individual elements can significantly contribute to the article's appeal, in combination the elements may significantly reduce (suppression) or increase (synergism) the article's appeal. This effect is generally referred to as interactions. Although individual elements may have low or negative utility values, indicating that each of the individual elements can significantly reduce, or at least not contribute to the article's appeal, in combination the elements may significantly contribute to the article's appeal. Consequently, to determine which elements, when in combination produce an effect different than that indicated by the utility values of the individual elements, a marketing team must, to some extent, rely on intuition, i.e., an imperfect analysis that often produces incorrect results, and must test a few of these combinations.
There is believed to be a need for a system and method that may identify the extent to which utility values of individual elements are affected by a combination of the individual elements, rather than testing a few predefined combinations.